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Chick-Fil-A and Social Change

July 31, 2012 2:39 pmJuly 31, 2012 2:39 pm

It was good to see a number of liberal writers and voices — Adam Serwer and Kevin Drum, the reliably principled Glenn Greenwald, the editors of this newspaper and the editors of the Boston Globe, among others — speak out against the travesty of liberal big-city mayors (and, in New York, a mayor-in-waiting) threatening to use legal power to block Chick-Fil-A from opening outlets in their cities because the chicken chain’s higher-ups oppose gay marriage. A recurring theme in these pieces, though, was the appealing but not terribly convincing idea that this kind of threatening bluster risked backfiring on same-sex marriage supporters, and that their cause would advance more swiftly without any hint of political intimidation. As my colleague Nate Silver tweeted: “Seems doubtful that gay rights will be advanced by government limiting individual choice and free speech.” Or as Greenwald wrote:

As always, the solution to noxious ideas like the ones from this chicken CEO are to rebut them, not use state power to suppress them. The virtue of gay equality has become increasingly recognized in the U.S. because people have been persuaded of its merits, not because state officials, acting like Inquisitors, forced people to accept it by punishing them for their refusal.

Greenwald and I have been over this ground a bit before, so I’ll say again what I said then: This is an idealized view of how cultures change, and it doesn’t acknowledge the link between law and culture, and the crucial role that stigma, harassment and legal sanctions can play in changing attitudes and behavior. The cause of gay marriage has indeed advanced because many millions of people have been persuaded of its merits: No cause could move so swiftly from the margins to the mainstream if it didn’t have appealing arguments supporting it and powerful winds at its back. But it has also advanced, and will probably continue to advance, through social pressure, ideological enforcement, and legal restriction. Indeed, the very language of the movement is explicitly designed to exert this kind of pressure: By redefining yesterday’s consensus view of marriage as “bigotry,” and expanding the term “homophobia” to cover support for that older consensus as well as personal discomfort with/animus toward gays, the gay marriage movement isn’t just arguing with its opponents; it’s pathologizing them, raising the personal and professional costs of being associated with traditional views on marriage, and creating the space for exactly the kind of legal sanctions that figures like Thomas Menino and Rahm Emanuel spent last week flirting with.

This reality is not a judgment on the cause of gay marriage itself. Many admirable causes, including the cause of civil rights for African-Americans, have advanced through a similar legal and social redefinition of what constitutes acceptable opinion, and obviously gay people have historically been the victims, rather than the victimizers, where the human tendency to use law and custom to pathologize difference and marginalize dissent from respectable opinion is concerned. But it’s naive to think that gay marriage is only winning because of the power of sweet reason, and that the climate created by the bluster of figures like Menino and Emanuel isn’t a big part of the story as well. When David Blankenhorn, heretofore one of the leading critics of same-sex marriage, wrote last month that he was “bending the knee” on the issue, it was an explicit nod to this reality: Causes advance by persuading people to change their minds, but they win their final, sweeping victories by inducing people who haven’t really changed their mind to simply give up the fight. And there’s no surer way to gain that kind of victory than by adding legal hassles — or even just the threat of legal hassles — to the list of reasons why the fight isn’t worth having anymore.

With all of that said, there is one complicating factor here, and that’s the extent to which our polarized politics tends to work powerfully against consensus, creating incentives for conservatives to disagree with liberals and vice versa on every single great issue of the day. In such an atmosphere, it’s possible that there are inherent limits to the process of marginalizing dissent even on an issue where elites are increasingly united and the underlying trend is clear, because the overall incentive to conform is matched by the partisan incentive to dissent. (Here it’s worth contrasting the way opinion on gay marriage shifted in the first two years of the Obama era among Democrats and independents with the way it mostly didn’t shift among Republicans and conservatives.) This reality might complicate the advantages of legal pressure as a tool of social change. It’s at least possible that the anti-Chick-Fil-A mayors are hastening the consolidation of support for gay marriage in certain important climates (big cities, the business world, etc.), but also hardening resistance to same-sex marriage among the many Americans conditioned by polarization to disagree with anything that Rahm Emanuel does no matter what.

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Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.